Japanese Grammar Quiz
Posted by harvey in Books, Language on 17. Mar, 2009 | 5 Comments
Are you confident in your Japanese language skills? Try this pretty tough online grammar quiz and see what you still need to learn. Japanese Grammar Quiz 文法クイズ After you submit your answers it will tell you what you got wrong, and explain what the correct answer should be. It’s all in Japanese, so this is [...]
Japanese Phrases iPhone App
Posted by harvey in Gadgets, Language on 10. Mar, 2009 | 4 Comments
In case you haven’t tried it yet, here is a promo video of the JapanShop’s iPhone/iPod Touch application. You can get a 400-phrase version of the application for free, and upgrade to the full 800-phrase version for less than the cost of a slice of pizza. おいしいですね。 – Harvey
Speak proper Kansai-ben with IKOKA and Nakama Yukie
Posted by harvey in Language, Osaka on 07. Mar, 2009 | 4 Comments
Intonation matters when speaking Japanese sometimes. In this video the mascot for ICOCA teaches Yukie Nakama how to properly say “ICOCA de ikouka” in Kansai dialect. ICOCA Mascot: ICOCAで行こか EN: “Shall we go using ICOCA?” Nakama Yukie: ICOCAで行こうか EN: “Shall we go using ICOCA?” ちゃうちゃう、ICOCAで行こかや。 EN: “No-no-no, it’s, ‘shall we go using ICOCA?’” Nakama Yukie: [...]
Drinking and Laughing
Posted by harvey in Culture, Language on 03. Feb, 2009 | 6 Comments
In my post about Japanese words to express laughter, reader “Taeko” asked how to say 笑い上戸 (warai jyougo) in English. I just got around to taking a look – I had never heard that expression before. This question led me down a fun rabbit hole of Japanese language excitement! So fun in fact, that I [...]
Laughing in Japanese
Posted by harvey in Language on 10. Jan, 2009 | 9 Comments
There are many ways to describe laughter in Japanese. 笑う (warau) is to main verb “to laugh”. It can also mean to smile, depending on the context. There are many more phrases to express laughter or smiling in Japanese, and many use the same 笑 Kanji character. Note that not all of these phrases are [...]
Textbooks for learning and teaching Japanese
Posted by harvey in Books, Language on 06. Jan, 2009 | 9 Comments
My wife is thinking about trying to teach Japanese to people in the neighborhood as a side-business. She knows Japanese, of course, but has never taught it, so now she has to “study” Japanese in order to build up a lesson plan. Luckily with the excellent textbooks available for Japanese learning this isn’t going to [...]
Free Live Japanese Language Lessons
Posted by harvey in Language on 06. Dec, 2008 | 2 Comments
Hey fellow Japan-heads. Free live Japanese lessons using Internet cameras and whatnot are available through a company called edufire. Check out this post on the Tofugu blog for more information. Eventually users will have to pay a monthly fee to use the service, but for now it’s free. I haven’t tried them yet myself, but [...]
Register for the JLPT
Posted by harvey in Books, Language on 19. Aug, 2008 | 5 Comments
Time to register for the JLPT folks. The test is December 7th, all around the world. I passed JLPT level 1 back in 2003, but I’m going to take it again as incentive to keep studying Japanese even while back here in the states. I am a slacker by nature, so I need something like [...]
